Friday, April 22, 2011

The first one is PaperPlane, a simple video game where you fly a paper airplane through and around a rural farmhouse landscape. Flying through the swing or under the belly of the grazing cows enables “childhood memories” that give you access to little sketches which can be viewed in a polaroid pictures book inside a tree house.

You can control the plane using the keyboard, although an Xbox controller or gamepad is preferred. The game requires Windows XP (SP2 or later), Vista or 7 and a graphics card supporting Shader Model 2.0. The game installer is a hefty 200MB download.

PaperPlane won the student first prize (ex-aequo) at the Milthon Awards 2010. It was also among the finalist in the 2011 Independent Games Festival Student Showcase.

My second suggestion is a funny third person adventure game called Octodad.

Octodad is a game about destruction, deception, and fatherhood. The player controls Octodad, a dapper octopus masquerading as a human, as he goes about a day of his life. His existence is a constant struggle, as he must master mundane tasks with his unwieldy boneless tentacles while simultaneously keeping his cephalopodian nature a secret from his human family.

Octodad was chosen as one of the eight Winners in the 2011 Independent Games Festival Student Showcase. It was also awarded second place at JayisGames Best of 2010 in the Puzzle Category.

Octodad requires a DirectX 9.0c complaint graphics card such as Intel GMA 950 or better. Good news is, it is available for both Windows and Mac.

The third is a Flash game which is also available as a downloadable copy.

A House in California is a surreal, narrative game about four characters who bring a house to life. Within the game, the player guides the four characters to engage with environments and activities drawn from a combination of memory, research, poetry, and fantasy.

The game is inspired aesthetically by Mystery House, developed in 1980. But whereas Mystery House is a mystery story about greed and murder, A House in California is more like an Imagist poem about family and memory which draws the player into the inner lives of its four characters.

A House in California was a finalist for the Nuovo award in the 2011 Independent Games Festival.